Much of the interesting work done in anthropology, sociology, and religious studies departments, for example, draws on both the first and the second approach). Thus in principle it is the study of all religions from a viewpoint not isolated within any one of them. Your email address will not be published. Religious beliefs, in particular, are only one sub-set of a larger class, which political philosophers, following John Rawls, call “conceptions of the good.” On this view, a liberal state protects, not only freedom of religion, but more generally freedom of conscience; it disestablishes, not only dominant religion, but also any controversial conception of the good. PDF | The issue of methodological approach in the study of religion has remained an enigma to many scholars of science of religion... | Find, read and cite all … The concept exhibits “a complex continuum of resemblances and differences.” In sum, the “anthropological” objection urges us to take both ordinary language and ordinary experience seriously. To ask that the law embrace and describe the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the context of recent debates in political theory. View Approaches to Studying Religion Milestone 1.pdf from PHL MISC at University of Phoenix. The Covid-19 Pandemic and Nigeria’s Economic Crisis: Between Pain and Reform? A response to Crockford. Cécile Laborde is Professor of Political Theory at University College London. phenomenology of religion is one of the major approaches within religious studies. The only appropriate scholarly stance towards this object is one that is critical and skeptical. According to William Cavanaugh’s provocative thesis, the fact that Christianity is construed as a religion, whereas nationalism is not, ensures that the Christian’s public and lethal loyalty belongs to the nation-state. This had led some scholars, such as Tim Fitzgerald and Naomi Goldenberg, to draw the radical conclusion that the category of religion should be simply abandoned. From this perspective, the egalitarian strategy of analogizing religion is a productive one: the law should not capture “religion” as such, but whatever dimensions of religion are normatively salient and suitable for legal protection. So critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law). According to a number of scholars (often influenced by Foucauldian or post-colonial thought), the category of religion is deeply implicated in the history and practice of western statism and imperialism. This is an important critique, which draws on what I have called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) approach to religion. I do not think it is, although I cannot make the full case here. The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press 2008). Anthropologists, for example, legitimately study a key dimension of human experience—the religious experience—in its diversity and unruliness. Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have shown, for instance, that liberal secularism requires individual belief—not communal observance, rituals or embodied piety—to be taken as the essence of religiosity. It is a rich concept that connects to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires, and practices in particular traditions in distinctive ways. Let me get back to the starting point of our inquiry: Is religion a valid category of scholarly research? 5/18/2020 Sophia : Welcome Score 23/25 You passed this … Not surprisingly, religion-making quickly became a tool of colonial and neo-colonial governance. It is Jacques Waardenburg’s merit to have assembled in Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion well-chosen excerpts from the works of forty-one scholars, from Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) to Joachim Wach (1898-1955), who sought to explain this most peculiar of human creations. The point has been made with particular acuity by legal scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in her book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. About Approaches to the Study of Religion. The normative objection is slightly different. First, different disciplines will have different answers to the question of what the concept of religion is for; and as a result they will work with different conceptions of religion. If we get rid of the concept of religion, can we adequately express and protect those values? aspects. As de Vries puts it: `The nineteenth-century scholars made abundant use of the new materials. Second, secular modernity is itself rooted in a distinctive Protestant anthropology, the ethos of which neatly maps onto a modern liberal subjectivity that encourages the individual to cultivate the autonomy and discipline required to relate to her beliefs and ends in the right way. There are two main reasons for this suspicion. Consider an analogy with marriage. Read reviews from world’s largest community for readers. The study of religion, also known as religious studies is an academic field of knowledge that focus on research of religion in its theoretical (philosophical background of the doctrine and ethics) and practical (cult, religion behaviors, etc.) Second, however, we may ask whether the normative analogy used by egalitarian theorists of religious freedom is the right one. “The notion that such a study is the objective and comparative study of religion. Ever since the study of religion became a discipline independent of Christian Title: Approaches To The Study Of Religion By Peter Connolly Author: gallery.ctsnet.org-Ines Gloeckner-2020-10-02-06-49-46 Subject: Approaches To The Study Of Religion By Peter Connolly Religion-making involved singling out certain social activities and cultural practices as “religious” and de-politicizing them (see Hinduism in India). approach to the study of religion in a coherent way, Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phänomenologie der Religion (1933).”13 Another scholar who sees Hegel’s infl uence on the phenomenol-ogy of religion is Olof Pettersson who argues that, contrary to seeing van der Leeuw as the originator on the strength of the above named work of this approach: Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. Approaches to the Study of Religion book. 1. Get Book. SSRC activities span more than 80 countries on 6 continents, Apply for research opportunities across the globe, Contributions fund research and scholarship worldwide. The Study of Religion : A Historical Approach (1967), such discoveries were seldom considered in their own right; seldom allowed to `speak for themselves' . 300 Cadman Plaza West • 15th Floor • Brooklyn, NY 11201 • USA They argue, for example, that exemptions from general laws can be justified on the ground of conscience; and that what the state should not “establish” are conceptions of the good. The Inside Perspective versus the Outside Perspective; 4. The second ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western idea of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. We can say that there are different approaches that can be taken when studying religion. Methodological Approaches to the Study of Religion Extract Keywords: faith, tradition, transcendence, method, temperamental attitude 2.1 Theological Approach Early religious studies as a scientific discipline started from the second half of the 19th century. This is the first book to provide an introduction to contemporary cultural approaches to the study of religion. The disaggregating approach helps us answer this critique. Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of “religion” to national traditions (see Shintoism in Japan and Confucianism in China). These (and others) are all legitimate uses of the concept of religion. Kujenga Amani facilitates the exchange of ideas about diverse aspects of peacebuilding in Africa. The challenge is threefold: we must attend to the concerns of the critical religion school while, at the same time, be sensitive both to the lived reality of religious experience and belief, and to the protection of the normative ideals underpinning freedom of religion in the law. It may well be true that the boundaries between religion and other cognate concepts such as tradition, culture, ideology, faith, reason, and so forth are porous and fuzzy. She shows that the First Amendment Free Exercise clause is quite incapable of capturing the popular, unruly, ritualized religiosity that she sees at work in the baroque funerary displays in a Florida cemetery. Download Classical Approaches To The Study … (PDF) Approaches to the study of globalization This article throws light on the four important approaches to the study of organisational behavior, i.e, (1) Human Resource Approach, (2) Contingency Approach, (3) Productivity Approach, and (4) System Approach. We pick out, from the complex notion of “religion” that we have inherited, distinct elements and values that democratic law has good reason to protect. The first is that religion is (as Daniel Dubuisson once wrote) “the West’s most characteristic concept, around which it has established and developed its identity.” There is a deep and significant continuity between the Christian defense of the “true religion” and the nineteenth-century invention of “world religions.” The universalism of the concept masked an internally hierarchical classificatory scheme, which, as Tomoko Mazuzawa has shown, was crafted within the crucible of the missionary and colonial encounter. By “criticizing religion,” I mean not the critique of the beliefs or practices of self-described religious individuals or groups but rather the critique of the concept of religion as a scholarly category. So neutrality, for liberals such as Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, is “generalized non-establishment.” Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom offer a compelling response to the “critical religion” school. Such struggles were political through and through, and it is impossible to discern any common core or essence to all the world religions, as W. C. Smith pointed out in 1962. Your email address will not be published. Whereas it might, at first, appear that the Americas is an overwhelming Christian bloc, the reality is not that simple. Required fields are marked *. It is Jacques Waardenburg’s merit to have assembled in Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion well-chosen excerpts from the works of forty-one scholars, from Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) to Joachim Wach (1898-1955), who sought to explain this most peculiar of human creations. Psychology of Religion; 8. Methodological Approaches to the Study of Religion; 2.1 Theological Approach; 2.2 Philosophical Approach; 2.3 Religious Approaches; 3. Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the context of recent debates in political theory. Religion should be disaggregated into a number of different values which relate to the law of the liberal state in different ways. How would a strategy of “disaggregating religion” help here? Religion is a concept created by modern scholars and superimposed on a variety of different phenomena for a variety of motives. The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. Which politics of nature? Although the phenomenology of religion emerges as both a major field of study and an extremely influential approach to religion, formulating an essay on this subject poses serious difficulties. Analogy used by egalitarian theorists have picked a normatively problematic, or normatively narrow, for! 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